On A Boat To Nowhere

My deep psyche offers up an image symbolizing my current phase of life. It is one of a small white sail boat, having just left shore. The sands are gold, and the port city is old, white, and well-lit. The deep blue of the ocean the boat is riding on expands into darker and darker shades, and then to pure black. It seems the journey is to nowhere, and will end with defeat.

I have it good - really good. I live in a wealthy country, in a wealthy city, surrounded by varying degrees of wealth. I have a great job, I am working my way up the corporate ladder quicker than others, next month I will be the youngest supervisor in my entire company. At 25, I am set for life, set for a good career, set for the upper middle class, condo, cars, and travel. All signs point to success! It worries me that I am settling in for the ride, accepting the journey.

When I remember to give myself a reality check, I quickly come to the conclusion that this is nothing. It is nothing, it is worth nothing, it will amount to nothing, and I am wasting my life. It is a prevailing thought in my mind when it is not busy thinking about other things, that I am for more than this, that we all are for more than this. I can't speak for everyone, but we are wasting our lives!

I feel like I'm soley responsible for wasting my life, as I am not trying at all. Like the movement of the little sailboat is because of its sail catching the strength of another force, the wind, so am
I, coasting along, not putting any effort in. But I still go forward.

But what do I do? Most people say that to add meaning to their life they need to go out and "make a difference", but I don't care about making a difference. Yeah, the world sucks, but the forecast doesn't call for anything better. There's charity, but I'm a skeptic. I don't want to be charitible just to make myself feel better, or to create the "well-balanced" life that all the "experts" say I should have.

I want to do what God made me to do, which will involve my natural gifting and deep passions. Maybe some of what He has planned for me is charity and "making a difference" - let it be. Maybe it will be something else entirely. I know one thing is true, He did not make me to be an industrial robot or a human resource.

I feel ready. Like I've grown up, shaken off the oppression and binds of a past life, given sight to faith, born a healthy degree of skepticism, and rooted myself in reality. Enough, anyway, to
take on whatever He has for me.

The Darkest Days

Vancouver songstress Sarah McLachlan opens her song World On Fire with the lyrics “Hearts are worn in these dark ages”. Every time I hear that song, I think about how a lot of people think that we live in the darkest days in history. My tendency is to think that while yes, there are dark things happening on earth, and horrifying potential, we are actually the most privileged set of human beings ever to live on this planet.

There are famines, there are population problems, there is global warming, there are wars and threats of wars, terrorism, nuclear technology, and outbreaks of diseases. But what are these problems compared to the problems of the past? We are privileged enough to have international law, whereby cruel dictators, which are dwarfed by ancient figures like devil-spawn Nero, can be stripped of their power. We have the technology that has created a better world in so many ways, such as medicine and healthcare and sanitation. We have advanced more in 100 years than humanity advanced in all of recorded human history combined in every way. We have a large portion of the planet’s population living under legitimate democratic government. We no longer have an educated elite hanging on to the ignorance of a general populace who can’t read to fill their coffers with the gold and silver of repentance. I could go on and on…

It’s been said that every generation says that the world is a worse place than when they were young. This all comes down to perspective. When they were young, they didn’t know half of what was going on, and weren’t versed enough in life to know how bad something actually is. When they become an adult, rationality is hijacked by the emotions involved in having children of their own, so mole hills become mountains, and everyone forgets that no one is dying from Polio anymore! Everyone forgets that Christians don’t get dipped in tar, have their mouths sewn shut, set on fire, and hung on a pole to light the road into Rome anymore.

Yet all the visible signs of a better world speak nothing of the heart’s condition. With the freedom of speech and the freedom of lunacy, the ease and universal nature of communication mediums, the inflammatory tendency of the media, there is mass confusion, a hiding of truth in the noise of opinion and commentary. This confusion added to the already confused state of most Western young people, whose legacy is one of confusion and non-clarity. No one knows who they are, where they are, why they are. The hearts of the fathers have turned from those of the sons, and because of this, the sons have done the same to their fathers. Starting with the industrial age, and ending in the death of any resemblance of the family necessary for proper nurture and care. Even though I can spend 8 hours in a plane and land on the other side of the planet unharmed, the world is full of despair and confusion.

Yes, we are wonderful, but we are despaired. Maybe, with this widespread darkness of the inner self, we do actually live in the darkest days... yet.

Communique l'kook

Remember the name Ronald Weinland. I stumbled upon his website(s) and his free online book entitled '2008: God's Final Witness' yesterday. I started to read the book, thinking it was just another preacher pulling headlines from the newspapers which 'prove' that the world is about to end. Not the case with this guy; he was very "right" in his style, in that he would admit that many people make claims about different signs and events and have done so since Jesus ascended, but he claimed his book is the only one that is actually correct. And without real reason.

I was astonished when, in his discussion about the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11, he actually claims to be one of them! He goes through the texts that describe these two end-time prophets, including some outside of Revelation (pretty hefty stuff), and then WHAMMY! he's one of them!! I took a gander at some of his sites - he has a few. You may want to check them out yourself (but only if you have absolutely nothing else to do...):

http://www.the-end.com/

http://www.ronaldweinland.com/

http://www.cog-pkg.org/

I never once entertained the thought of his audacious claim being true, but from what I've learned about the closed-minded missing the work of God, I decided to humour the man. I emailed him, or whoever it is that answers his emails, asking what the events were surrounding his "appointment by God", thinking that the commissioning of something so magificent and glorious and long-prophesied, bigger than the ministries of Moses and Elijah, would be quite an event! I also asked what proof in the way of miracles and/or displays of God's power he could provide to prove his claim.

I got a form letter back, and basically it explained that they are too busy to reply so read this and don't bother us anymore. It went on to explain how to "get ready" for the end of the world, one step of which is to read his two books over and over and over again. No where did it say anything about his "appointment by God" or any evidence to prove he is indeed one of "the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth". I replied saying, "There was no answer to my question in your form letter. Please be so kind as to provide an actual response or refer me to where the answer is posted online."

They replied: "Your question was more than adequately answered. We do not offer cliff notes."

I then commented on the maturity level of their organization and how the failure to provide answers on those questions not just to me, but to the whole freakin world (which he'll soon lay waste to), was proof enough that this was a Communique l'kook! I also promised him a special feature on my blog.

Take a good look; fire may come out of his mouth and destroy us all one day.

PostSecret.com

New favourite site: http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

Some people are so sad! :(

The Light of Darkness

I brought 2 books with me on a recent R&R trip to Hawaii, and I read one. The first was called ‘2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl’ by Daniel Pinchbeck, the second was ‘Piercing the Darkness’ by Frank Peretti. I only finished the first one, and it was so intriguing. To give you some background, it is based on ancient Mayan prophecies that date a cataclysmic end of time on December 21, 2012. It is actually more of a memoir of the author on things like shamanism, the use of hallucinogens, the occult, psychic ability, dreams, visions, visitations, the question of reality (matter, spirit), crop circles, alien abductions, and planetary movement. All of these things I have never thought twice about previously, dismissing them without question. I didn’t even know that this book had any of this content when I bought it; I was just interested in the Mayan calendar (ha!).

Through the author’s encounters with shamanic bush tribes in Africa and South America, through meetings with Priestesses, and through his use of certain barks and mushrooms (and other chemical synthetics), he described interaction with beings that we, as Christians, would call demons. It was so intriguing! I got so much insight into what “powers and principalities” really means, and it is nothing like I had previously thought.

Once I had finished this one, I looked at my next book, Piercing the Darkness, and was struck by the title. As Christians, even as a society in general, we tend to qualify anything evil as darkness. Light good, evil dark. However, because of the things I read in 2012, and based on certain truths about “the darkness”, this is probably a little misleading, and potentially harmful.

One of the best things I’ve learned is that the truth is one thing, and everything that isn’t the truth, no matter how close to the truth, is simply not truth (or un-truth). We call these lies – probably because this implies there’s someone to blame. In fact the best lies, the most difficult to catch, are those that are closest to the truth. Take a look at the very first lie; it’s rank with truth. We often associate truth with light, but we should not forget that the direct translation of the name of the Great Deciever Lucifer is ‘Light-Bearing One’. He was the son of the morning, the bright and morning star, the bearer of light. Nothing says he still isn’t a light-bearing one.

Through the descriptions of chats with the ‘powers and principalities’ and demons in 2012, I think it is hard to say that these beings are of darkness (not that they aren’t). In fact, you’d be hard pressed to imagine them being evil. This is because they are simply off-truth; they are of a culture a little to the left or to the right of God’s culture. Some might even call them good. We know that there is only One who is good though.

When you think about it, because there is only One who is good, just like there is only One possible Truth, off-good or off-truth or "evil" is just like us. We are the same as them, and we rarely consider ourselves evil. In fact, we consider ourselves to be generally good. How dangerous to presume the "powers of darkness" represent the other end of the spectrum of good and evil!

Theology, movies, books, stories all paint a picture of evil using fangs dripping blood and hairy heaving beasts. Maybe this is so we miss what evil really is – and fall right into it.

Bill O'Reilly

You'd expect an interviewee to get more words out than the interviewer in "fair and balanced" reporting, as found on Fox News, wouldn't you?

I don't know what irks me more -- the fact that Bill O is a real person, or the fact that he gets his own show on Fox. He makes me feel very smart.

Idiot Parade

One stormy Hawaiian evening last week, I resorted to watching the CNN YouTube Republican Debate, which presented all of the leading contenders for alpha male of the elephant herd. A former Bush-lover myself, I was shown the distinct evolution in myself and my own views over the past several years as I became increasingly agitated by some of the answers given to the questions of the general YouTube audience. It was more than the transparent attempts to woo voters, as every true politician is an expert at doing, using slogans and buzz words and even dressing like the President, it was some of the idiotic and prehistoric standpoints that really bothered me.

Of particular irk, a question challenging the military’s ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy about gay service-people. See clip.

I was astounded by Duncan Hunter’s answer, which proposed that “most” of the young people entering the military come from “Judeo-Christian” (buzz word) families, and because of this, would be uncomfortable and unfocused on the task at hand (in combat) if one of their peers was openly gay. Duncan wants to protect these poor children from the real world, and prevent the metaphorical bursting of their bubble. He gets the home school vote.

Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas, accepts the rights of homosexuals to be whatever they want, but seems to allude to the potential “conduct” of these people as something of a lower class breed. He gets the fundamentalist vote.

Governor Mitt Romney skirted around the issue, not really answering in the end, knowing full well his answer could make or break him with some in the audience. If you look closely you can see him sweat when Anderson Cooper presses him for an answer, eventually saying that he doesn’t know, he’d ask his military counterparts. I hope he gets nobody’s vote.

Back to Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas. It was he who was filmed with a Mr. Rick Mercer a while back on a hilarious CBC show called “Talking to Americans”, where we get a kick out of displaying the ignorance of some of our neighbours by getting them to say things like “Congratulations Canada for finishing the Tunnel to China!!”. (Really, we just want to make ourselves feel better about our inferiority complex.) Anyway, Presidential-hopeful Mike Huckabee is featured with a congratulations of his own. While I like to point out this little knowledge gap of someone wanting the planet’s top job, I have to say, he wouldn’t really be taking the cake, currently being eaten by the man of the [white] house. Take a look at Mike.

I almost want to take my chance at becoming an American citizen JUST to NOT vote for any of these guys.